


The Secret in the Song

by RABunzai



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: F/M, Not Actually Unrequited, Not Avengers: Age of Ultron (Movie) Compliant, Pepper gets it, Songfic, Unrequited Love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-06
Updated: 2015-10-06
Packaged: 2018-04-25 03:34:16
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,798
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4945222
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RABunzai/pseuds/RABunzai
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Clint has never said ‘I love you’ to Natasha. But then again she’s a spy and if she’s been listening then she already knows.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Secret in the Song

 

Clint tugs at his bowtie for the fifth time that hour and does his best not to glare at the last remaining guests of Stark’s cocktail party. The tower floor is mostly empty save for the few stragglers determined to make the most of the free wine and canapés. They have stiff competition in Steve and Thor who are consuming the left over finger food by the tray, although Steve is at least trying to look subtle about it. Thor has four arancini balls in his hand and another two in his mouth.

Tony has gone to find Bruce who spent most of the night hiding in the labs. Clint would have joined him in hiding if it weren’t for a raised eyebrow from Natasha, her meaning clear. _Suit up._ _I’ll not suffer through this alone._

They are technically working, using Stark’s party as an opportunity to interrogate a handful of defense personnel suspected in moving weapons off the books. Clint’s effort at small talk has gotten him nowhere though except for mildly frustrated.

Natasha seems to have fared better. She’s currently dancing with their number one suspect, one of only a few couples left on the dance floor, moving lightly to the sound of strings floating over the rooms speakers.

He knows better than to interrupt her work so he wanders around a bit until he finds himself drawn to the large piano sitting in the corner of the landing. In true Stark fashion it looks ridiculously expensive and like it’s never been touched. On a whim he takes a seat in front of it and discovers he now has a perfect sightline across the whole of the room.

Natasha’s laugh hits his ears and he turns to watch her as she smiles at her over eager dance partner. One curl falls loose from her hair and Clint fights the familiar longing to tuck it back into place. Her hair is longer than when he saw her last, almost three months ago in a safe house in Sicily. Since then he’s been working surveillance in Kabul while she’s drifted across Europe helping Steve search for a ghost. Her hair is longer and darker, her skin tinged pink with a sunburn and he wants to touch her to see if it’s warm under his hand. He’s gets lost in the thought and doesn’t notice the movements of his fingers on the piano when they tap out a rhythm he learned years ago.

“I love that song, and that movie, _oh_. Are you a Patrick Swayze fan?” Pepper asks from behind him and Clint has the grace not to jump out of his seat. Natasha has noticed the stiff movement of his shoulders though because of course she has and he can see her eyeing him subtly whilst still dancing with the Lieutenant general. Being acutely aware of her watching him, he nods his head to show her its okay and offers Pepper a cocky grin.

“Red Dawn’s a great movie. A classic even.” Pepper looks puzzled for a moment before something like understanding flickers in her eyes. She takes a spot on the bench next to him.

“You like music.” Pepper states. It’s an observation, not a question.

“I’m a country boy at heart. Nothing like a good song about a girl and a shiny new truck.” He shrugs, playing up his southern drawl.

“And you play the piano?” she asks, gesturing to the ivory keys in front of him.

“Not well, one of my-” He stops because he doesn’t want to tell Pepper where he learned. Lucy was well meaning older woman from Ohio who had tried to do something right by taking in two troubled boys. It hadn’t worked out.

“…I may have learned a few songs when I was younger in the hopes of impressing the girls.”

“Did it work?”

“A few, they were all good girls though so I learned guitar instead ‘cos I liked the bad ones better.” He smirks and wags his eyebrows. Pepper gives him a knowing smile but has enough tact not to look towards the red head on the dance floor.

 

“Can you teach me?” She asks even as she settles her wine glass on top of the piano, adjusting her position so she’s studiously sitting ready with her fingers over the keys.

“I’m pretty terrible but we can start easy.” He picks something simple, one of the first songs he’d ever learned and shows her what keys to hit with what fingers. Pepper is an extremely fast study or else he’s possibly being played.

Clint sings gently as she taps out the keys with perfect precision. “ _The itsy bitsy spider climbed up the water spout_ …”

At the same time the music over the speakers seems to lull and his voice carries across the room. He bites his tongue when he catches Natasha watching him but she simply rolls her eyes and smiles into the shoulder of her dance partner.

“Have you told her?” Pepper asks, a small smile on her lips as she continues to play the notes to an almost empty room.

Clint shakes his head.

“Told her what?” he asks, improvising with a few notes of his own.

“That you love her.”

It’s so unexpected he hits the wrong key and she pauses. He sucks in a breath, composes himself and picks up where she left off. Pepper is still waiting for him though and he sighs.

“If she’s been listening then she already knows.”

 

…….

Early on Clint learns about love through music. After his father had been drinking, after he’d wrecked his way through the house in a haze of alcohol and violence leaving his mother to clean up the broken pieces, she’d lay with he and Barney in a nest of blankets and sing them to sleep. Maybe in the vain hope that they’d dream about something better. Slow songs, lullaby’s sung softly through her split lip in apology for the life they were living. Her love was a melody; safety after the storm and Clint clung to it with bruised fingers during those long nights.

His father eventually took her from him of course and Clint still dreams about the sound the tyres made on the blacktop and the sickening crunch of metal buckling. After that he doesn’t find meaning in music for a long time.

 

…..

 

They walk to her room from another session of deprogramming. Clint doesn’t know what happens in that lab but he can see the way it takes its toll on her. Today looks like it’s been bad judging by the way her limbs hang heavy by her sides and she doesn’t immediately case the corridor for threats.

She opens the door to her room, takes one step inside and then pauses momentarily to strand them both in the doorway. Despite the challenges of the day she meets his eyes and he’s struck by the fight in them. It’s fraying and crumbling at the edges but it’s there and it’s real. Some of the doctors and scientists think she’s unbreakable but Clint knows in that moment that it’s not true. She’s been broken but by sheer force of will she is putting herself together one aching piece at a time

She takes his hand and holds it gently, as if worried he’s going to snatch it away. He doesn’t though and he sees her take it as permission. She turns his palm over and traces a pattern on his lifeline, something he doesn’t recognize. She meets his gaze again and pulls her hands away, moving herself to sit on the bed with her back against the wall.

“Stay” She whispers softly and he can hear just how hard it was for her to say the word, to simply ask for what she wants, what she needs.

“Okay” He moves to rest himself against the wall beside her, close but not touching and sees her muscles unwind, some of the tension falling from her shoulders.

There’s the faint hum of observation equipment through the walls but otherwise its so quiet Clint can hear his heart beat slow in his ears.

He’s not sure what makes him do it. Maybe it’s a memory from long ago but he desperately wants her to feel safe and maybe this is the only way he knows how.

He starts to hum a song that comes to mind. He sees her breath catch before she settles again and when he starts to sing softly he sees her finally relax, letting her guard down just for him.

He meets her eyes when he sings the line because he wants her to know the truth that he learned a while ago, the truth that still scares him now.

“ _Sometimes you can’t make it on your own.”_

It’s a promise that he’ll have her back, that she won’t have to go it alone anymore and neither will he.

 

……

 

It’s one of their first missions together albeit a fairly easy one. They’re on a seven-hour road trip escorting a package from Alabama to Arkansas. She’s in the passenger seat with her feet up on the dash, sunset glowing pink and orange on her skin and the open window whipping her hair around like a wild flame.

He plays with the controls on the steering wheel, flicking through the stations until he finds the songs that fit. Songs about fast cars and open roads and things that make your heart race. She berates him for his channel surfing but he just grins and pushes harder on the accelerator. They make the journey in six hours and he feels a little cheated.

 

……

 

The German forest spins a lot faster than he remembers but that may be because he’s drugged out of his mind and slung over Natasha’s shoulders as she carries him away from the underground bunker they’ve just broken out of.

“Barton, you still with me?” she asks, her voice straining with the effort to balance his weight.

“Hngh.” It was meant to be a yes but he can’t quite form the words. He feels like sleeping, when was the last time they slept? Five days ago? Six?

“Clint.” Her tone is sharp and it pulls his mind back from the edge, if only for a moment.

She hadn’t had the same reaction to the gas as he did. If he was thinking straight he could probably connect the dots and guess it involved what happened to her in the Red Room but all his mind can go to is the memory of her eyes when she found him. She was scared for him and the fear in her eyes tore at something in his chest.

“Hey, I need you to stay awake. Keep talking to me okay.”

“Don’t wanna talk” he gurgles, “Just sleep.” Doesn’t she know she’s so warm compared to the cell he’d been in?

“No,” Natasha growls and there’s something in her tone that he wishes he were more alert to contemplate. “Sing to me, something country.”

Maybe he is asleep and dreaming.

“You hate country.” She does, she glares at him when he plays it out loud instead of through his headphones.

“I know, so make it a good one.”

Oh hell, he must really be dying. He tries to lift his head to look at her but his body isn’t cooperating. Fine then, he’ll sing to her.

“ _You can tell the world you never was my girl, you can burn my clothes when I’m gone_ …” It’s not really singing as opposed to a raspy stutter but it’s the most he can do.

“ _You can tell your friends just what a fool I’ve been, and laugh and joke about me on the phone._ ” He closes his eyes because the shifting forest floor is making him dizzy. On the back of his eyelids he pictures her smiling.

“ _You can tell my arms to go back to the farm, you can tell my feet to hit the floor. Or you can tell my lips to tell my fingertips, they won’t be reaching out for you no more._ ” He feels her tighten her grip and pick up her pace.

“ _But don't tell my heart, my achy breaky heart, I just don't think he'd understand._

_And if you tell my heart, my achy breaky heart, he might blow up and kill this man_ ”

 

……

 

One day he walks in to her quarters on the helicarrier to find her cleaning her guns to the sound of swelling strings and horns and a rapid piano. He blinks because she’s never really showed a preference for classical music before even though he knows its woven deep into her past like _‘Entry of the Gladiators’_ is to his. He’s borrowed her workout playlist a few times, which has music in all sorts of languages and genres. When they’re together though, sparring or traveling or just winding down she usually lets him pick the soundtrack.

That night he crawls up into the ladders of the helicarrier and listens to Tchaikovsky and Beethoven and Vivaldi through his headphones.

Three weeks later they’re flying a jet to a job in Budapest and he plays Rachmaninoff through the speakers. She rolls her eyes and leans over him to cut it off. Her fingers dance on the keypad until a guitar kicks up and Springsteen starts in, slow and smooth. The Boss sings about being on fire and Clint feels a phantom heat crawl over his skin.

 

…….

 

The place smells like sweat and tobacco and the floor is sticky on his boots with more than just spilled beer. He’s standing in front of the jukebox perusing through the faded song lists when he feels Natasha approach.

“Hey there stranger, mind if I play a tune?”

She leans against the side of the machine and Clint cops an eyeful when her top dips a little too low. He bites his tongue; suddenly very appreciative of the dim lighting and smoky haze that permeates the little dive they’re in. He looks her in the eye because there is no safe place on her body to look.

She’s wearing jeans that are so tight they can’t be legal and every man and half of the women in the bar have been staring. He wonders briefly where her weapons are before he remembers that her body is her greatest weapon and she’s armed appropriately for the job at hand.

“Go ahead, darling,” he adds the endearment because he knows she’ll hate that she can’t hit him for it whilst they’re undercover. He can see a brief flash of violence in her eyes and he grins.

“Hmmm,” she purrs and leans in closer, too close until he can feel the heat of her through his shirt, her breath on his neck and his heart trips when she reaches into his pocket and pulls out a quarter.

She smirks and steps back a little to slide it in the coin slot. Before she can select a song Clint stabs at the nearest button because she’s not playing fair. The track clicks over.

_Shot through the heart and you’re to blame, darling you give love a bad name_.

She smiles at him, a deadly smile that’s so _Natasha_ before she hides it again and turns on her heel to make her way to the dance floor, to the mark whose been staring at her ass for the last ten minutes.

Clint sticks by the jukebox and watches. It doesn’t take long before the mark is enamored with her. He’s got his hands all over her and Clint feels his fingers twitch and the muscles in his arms pull tight. He tells himself its because he wants to loose an arrow at this guy who is a truly despicable human being as well as a bar creep and people trafficker. It’s not because his own fingers itch to trace the same patterns on her skin.

_Oh, oh, you're a loaded gun, oh, oh, there's nowhere to run_

_No one can save me, the damage is done_

 

………

 

He craves silence after Loki. He doesn’t want to hear people asking if he’s okay, he doesn’t want to hear the doctors ask him how he feels, he doesn’t want to hear _her_ tell him it’s not his fault.

He takes a page from Roger’s book and camps out in the gym, laying into the punching bag with bare knuckles and no care for precision or technique. His fists are leaving bloody marks on the canvas and he won’t be able to hold his bow for a day or two but that’s good. Maybe if he doesn’t touch it he won’t have to relive the things he did with it.

She comes up behind the bag, placing herself in his line of sight and holds it steady for a while, providing the resistance he craves as he lets it all out. When his punches get wide and wild she pushes the bag back at him, causing him to halt his onslaught and dodge. When the bag swings back she puts herself in the space between.

Natasha takes his hands in hers, runs a finger over swollen knuckles to write in code across his skin and then presses his palm to her chest. Through the soft fabric of her shirt he feels her heart beating. It’s an erratic rhythm but it matches his and it’s almost enough to know she’s real and not a red mark in _his_ ledger.

He falls on her, pushes her back till she’s trapped between the bag and him, his palm still over her heart and he’s probably getting blood on her shirt but that’s okay, better his blood than hers.

She lets him keep her there in the silence for as long as he needs, until his heartbeat slows and he’s ready to listen again.

 

….......

 

It’s a lazy Sunday morning in the towers communal room. Clint is lounging like a cat by the window, one arm propped behind his head looking longingly at the skyline stretched before him. He’s covered in band-aids and butterfly stitches, left foot wrapped up in a cast and resting on some overstuffed pillows.

Natasha is sitting in an adjacent chair calmly typing on her laptop. She’s got a deep purple bruise on her chin but appears otherwise fine.

_Avengers_. They were supposed to be a team of super heroes but Clint knows he could never describe himself as such. He was just a man and it was all too evident in the way he felt after the battles. Tony had his suits of armor and Steve had his serum, Thor was a God and Bruce… Even Natasha was enhanced in some way though she hated to talk about it.

But Clint… He was human and he broke and it was inevitable that he would slow down and fall behind. That’s why he was here at the tower covered in plasters whilst the rest of the team finished dismantling a mad scientist’s army somewhere in the Badlands.

And Nat…Clint can see her reflection in the window, watches her as she readjusts her position to resettle the laptop on her knees. She’d been the one to drag him to the jet and evac him out. He’d expected her to leave him in the med bay and fly back to the fight, only she’d refused.

“We’re a team. We look after each other”, she’d said.

He’s never been able to find the words to tell her what she means to him. He doesn’t think there are any words, not in English, not in any language he’s ever known. The closest he can get is to take out his phone, scrolling through his playlists until he finds a song that suits.

_We swore we'd travel darlin' side by side_  
_We said we'd walk together baby come what may_  
_That come the twilight should we lose our way_  
_If as we're walking a hand should slip free_  
_I'll wait for you, and should I fall behind_  
_Wait for me  
_

Natasha’s typing slows just a little, almost imperceptibly but he knows how capable those fingers are, knows the speed and precision and lethal power she hides and so he sees it when she slows her movements. The corners of her eyes crinkle a little and he thinks it’s as close to a smile as he’ll get right now.

_We swore we'd travel darlin' side by side_  
_We'd help each other stay in stride_  
_But each lover's steps fall so differently_  
_But I'll wait for you, and if I should fall behind_  
_Wait for me_

The day may come when he’s no longer an Avenger, when his body just won’t let him keep pace with super soldiers and gods. But there will never be a day when he’s not Strike Team Delta. He’ll be hers till his last breath.

 

……

 

Long after the party is over and the last guest has left the tower for the embrace of the dawn, she finds him on the roof leaning with his hands on the rail to overlook the sea of lights below them. He’s long known the cadence of her steps and so she doesn’t startle him when she comes up behind him and places her hand over his.

“We didn’t get to dance.” She whispers in his ear, leaning in to rest gently at his side. He takes his hand off the rail, turning his palm up to lace his fingers in hers and shrugs.

“None of the songs were right anyway.”

She squeezes his hand and then in an echo of a moment long age she draws a pattern on his palm. “I think I know one.”

She reaches across to pull his phone from his pocket and his heart still skips a beat at having her so close. Her fingers dance lightly across the screen before she finds what she’s after; leaving the phone on the rail as the opening notes hit the air around them.

The ballad starts up; a synthesizer and strings play gently to the tempo of a Viennese waltz. Her free hand finds his shoulder and Clint gets the hint, bringing his to rest at the small of her back.

She moves in close and he closes his eyes, enjoying the feel of her in his arms, her breath on his neck and her heartbeat against his chest. Her skin is warm under his touch.

_Don't ask me_  
 _What you know is true_  
 _Don't have to tell you_  
 _I love your precious heart_  
  
Clint has never said ‘I love you’ to Natasha. But then again she’s a spy and if she’s been listening then she already knows.

  
_I was standing_  
 _You were there_  
 _Two worlds collided_  
 _And they could never tear us apart_

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> Clint plays the opening to Unchained Melody on the piano.  
> The playlist is:  
> Sometimes You Can’t Make It On Your Own by U2  
> Life Is A Highway by Tom Cochrane  
> Achy Breaky Heart by Billy Ray Cyrus– someone has done a fantastic slow acoustic version living on Youtube somewhere.  
> I’m On Fire by Bruce Springsteen  
> You Give Love A Bad Name by Bon Jovi  
> If I Fall Behind by Bruce Springsteen  
> Never Tear Us Apart by INXS
> 
> This whole thing started because I wanted Clint to sing Achy Breaky Heart and then needed more.


End file.
